


Motherhood Suits You

by plinys



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A mess of headcanons and straying from my prompt, CarterCentury, F/M, Gen, Kid Fic, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:25:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1453663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because winning the war doesn't mean that the world is at peace, it just means the next generation is going to have to clean up the messes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Motherhood Suits You

**Author's Note:**

> For my CarterCentury prompt, which was "Peggy dealing with her first child wanting to join the army." I apologize because I sort of went away from my prompt, but yeah...
> 
> Also, unbeta'd for now, because I was already a day late getting this up, since friends dragged me to Disneyland yesterday!

“Motherhood suits you,” a friend had once said.

She was supposed to have taken that as a compliment, but she had never been able to. The words would play in repeat on her mind years later, like a ticking time bomb.

People always said a woman was happiest when she became a mother, but she didn’t feel particularly happy. She managed a small smile, holding her infant son in her lap, while thanking her friend.

Though later when she had put the boy to bed and had a glass of bourbon in her hands, she tells him that that was a horrible thing to say.

“Doesn’t make it any less honest, Peggy.”

Five years and two more boys later, she still didn’t believe his words.

Her husband is a good man, he’s a great father, he’s much better at the whole parenting thing than she could ever be. He tries to reassure her that she’s doing a good job, that the boys love her. He ignores her pleas when she asks how that could be, when she insists that her work keeps her too busy for the family they’ve built.

Her oldest son, barely five years old, sits up on the countertop swinging his legs back and forth. He seems surprised at her questioning him, “it’d be nice if you were home more,” he admits after a moment, “but I understand, daddy says you're really busy fighting the bad guys.”

The wars has been over for years, but her son looks up at her like she’s still fighting, like she’s some sort of hero. He doesn’t look at her like a son should look at her mother, rather more like a child looking up at a celebrity.

“I’m leaving SHIELD,” she announces a few days later, placing her letter of resignation on the director’s desk.

“Peggy-”

“You can’t convince me not to,” she says, “I’ve made up my mind.”

“I wasn’t going to try and change your mind.”

She claims that she’s doing it for the boys, wanting to be home for them. She can tell that he sees through her lies, but nods anyways, _motherhood suits you_ , their little white lie.

Technically she supposes that she is doing it for them. If things go south then she wants her family to be as far from that mess as possible.  

She spends the next four months locked up in her home office, scouring over SHIELD files and whited out reports that technically weren’t even supposed to exist, wondering how she had missed the obvious before.

She tries to tell him, they’re friends after all, but the words freeze up in her throat. She sets the phone down, the call ended too soon, uncertain of who she could trust.  

They reduce her to nothing more than a footnote in the grand scheme of things, a name on a piece of paper, a outdated portrait hanging on their headquarters wall, the women that helped found SHIELD.

She’s not certain whether she’s being written off because she is a woman or because she wasn’t one of _them_.  

As the years go past she tries not to think about it, she tries not to watch as the organization she helped found on noble intentions turns from its original purpose.

Instead she watches her boys sprout up, measuring their heights in marks along the doorframe and outgrown pairs of pants.

The boys play soldiers in the living room, shooting rubber band guns at each other, noises of triumph as they dart across the room.

She tries to breath, to steady herself, because she’s not the type to have war flashbacks, but there’s something so familiar about their shouts of victory. She can almost see her friends in their sunny faces, so innocent, so unaware of the horrors they’ve yet to face.

They’re just playing games, she tries to remind herself, it’s just a game to them.

Somedays its cowboys versus indians, others days they’re valiant knights slaying a dragon.

Today when she asks what game they're playing, her eldest happily informs them that they’re fighting Nazis, the moment of calm seems to shatter all at once.

“Why don’t you go play outside,” she says tersely, turning away before they can ask what is wrong.

She barely makes it back to her office, before it becomes hard to breath stopping up her throat, hands shaking as she goes to the phone sitting on her desk, dialing a familiar number.

“I need a drink,” she says as soon as the phone picks up.

There’s a laugh on the other end of the line, “I’ll have somebody swing by and get you.”

She wants to object, insist that she is more than capable of driving herself over there, but it’s been so long she’s not certain that she can remember the way. She’s not certain that her hands will stop shaking long enough to operate her car. So she accepts the ride without objection.

“We won the war,” she says later that night, though it almost sounds like a question, and she blames that on the warm feeling of the alcohol in her system, not her own self doubt.

“We did,” he agrees, though in the way he nods his head ever so slightly she hears what he’s not saying as well, but there’s always _another_  war around just the corner.

Yes, there is.

They both know this too well.

She had been born in the months after the war to end all wars, and had grown up to fight in one of her own.

Foolishly she had held onto a hope that the next generation might be lucky, that they might be spared from the horrors that had her tossing and turning in her bed at night. But she has seen the paper trail, has seen the signs written in red pen and hidden smirks.

“I was thinking of enlisting, once I graduate that is,” her oldest son says, as they’re sitting around the table for dinner one night, he’s grown up almost overnight, his head held high he explains why he thinks it will be a good idea to follow in her footsteps.  

Her food turns to dirt in her mouth, stomach churning at the thought.

She wishes she could be proud of him for want to stand up for what he believes on, but there was a reason Peggy had closed the doors on that part of life.

“Absolutely not,” she cuts him off, not missing the flicker of betrayal across his features before her son, barely eighteen, schools his expression into a look of nonchalance.

“There’s a war going on, mum,” he says like she isn’t aware of the situation, he states it a plain fact, as if she could have forgotten.

How could anyone have forgotten when every news channel from here to Los Angeles is playing the same stories. This is not a noble war, but he's barely more than a boy wanting to prove himself to the world, and he won’t realize that until it’s too late.

“This is not your fight,” she tries to explain, tries to put into words everything she sees wrong with the situation, try to explain that she doesn’t want to be handed another folded up flag and have condolences expressed to her by men that only act like they care.

In the end, it hadn’t matter whether she had wanted him to go or not. By the years end the draft had called his name, she supposed that in a sea of draft dodgers, she should be proud of him accepting his duty without flinching away. But he’s still too wide eyed, too long sheltered from the worse parts of the world.

She smooths down his hear that last night before he ships out to training, trying to impart onto him all of the knowledge that she has from her own time fighting for what she believes him. She tells him to watch the skies, to wear two pairs of socks at night, and all the other important things that mother’s are supposed to tell their sons.

“I’m so proud of you,” she says at long last, not sure why the words hurt so much more than they should.

The night after he ships out, she spends too long standing in an empty room trying to fight back tears.

It doesn’t take too long before the sadness turns to anger and she’s angrily turning the dial on her phone door to her officer locked, untouched wine glass sitting on a stack of papers that she probably ought to be looking through.

“I thought the war was over,” she says into the phone, her voice shaking ever so slightly.

It wasn’t.

It never was over.

She knows what’s coming before she happens. She isn’t certain how to explain it, a motherly instinct finally kicking in too many years too late, in the middle of eating breakfast with her two boys that remained at home, she froze in place for the briefest moment, spoon halfway to her lips, and she just knew, something was wrong.  

It took a week before she receives a letter

She supposes that she already knew what it was, though had she not the mailman's pitying look gives it all away. So impersonal, like many letters she had written years ago stationed in the German countryside to women waiting back at home.

Except now she was the mother waiting at home, staring at black letters on a white piece of paper say how they're so sorry for her loss.

Tell her that she was supposed to be proud, that Steven Carter died defending his country.

She doesn’t feel proud, she just feels numb.

She doesn’t stop feeling numb for a long time, for what seems like weeks or months or years, for what seems like a lifetime.

Her fingers curl around the edges of another folded up flag.

A momento of everything that’s been taken away from her.

She takes a shaky breath and realizes what she needs is to get away for a few days, to stop seeing shadows on the talls, hearing voices from years past; what she needs is a drink.

And so that’s exactly what she does, showing up unannounced, ignoring the knowing looks the empty inflections and _we’ve been expecting you_ , seems a bit too mocking at times.

“Maria’s pregnant,” he says two drinks into the night.

“Fatherhood will suit you,” she says a mockery of his words which will play on repeat in her head for the rest of eternity.

“That, my dear, I honestly doubt.”

 

 


End file.
